


Neville's Ark

by lilacsigil



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-16
Updated: 2006-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-10 03:17:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/94871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/pseuds/lilacsigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Request: A gen story that shows Snape learning to respect Neville. Setting - post-HBP or post-war. The respect issue can be as major or unimportant as you like to the story as a whole. I just want to see Snape acknowledging Neville's worth, damnit! I don't think things look very rosy for Snape after HBP, so I don't want him having it easy (perhaps he's living as something of a pariah, for example), but you don't have to have him under threat of execution or anything. I'm thinking drama rather than darkfic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Neville's Ark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lyras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyras/gifts).



> Notes: Neville's quote is slightly altered from Book XXV of The Natural History of Pliny the Elder, in the Bostock and Riley translation, and can be read in full at the end of the story. Allium moly is a real plant, and the non-Wizarding version can be seen [here](http://www.hort.net/gallery/view/lil/allmo/).

It had been several years since Snape last visited the cemetery. He still wasn't sure why he had decided to go today – his mother had a birthday every year, and he hadn't visited on any of the others. This morning, though, the weather had cleared, briefly, and the weak sunlight stirred some vague memory in him. He had immediately quashed it by listing all the other things he had to do today, but the paucity of that list made him uncomfortable, and he decided simply to go.

At least his mother was buried in a Muggle cemetery. There were no wizards to point and mutter – or call the Aurors, yet again, to arrest him – here in the muddy fields of tired headstones and sagging, elderly trees. Snape followed the zigzagging paths through little clusters of headstones and the occasional bright bronzed plaque, past a soggy collection of teddy bears and plastic flowers, to a familiar pair of headstones.

Snape's gaze ran automatically over the carved words: Tobias Snape, Loving Husband and Father. Eileen Snape, Loving Wife and Mother. Despite her place next to his father, whose epitaph wasn't entirely truthful, Snape was pleased that he'd obeyed his mother's wish to be buried here, among the Muggles. The graves themselves were neat and unremarkable, tended by the cemetery workers, unlike the rambling wizard graveyards that tended to fall into disrepair almost as soon as they were begun, beset by ghosts, boggarts and other haunts.

A speck of light caught his eye, something out of place. He slid his wand into his hand: although he hadn't cast a spell in self-defence for a long time, he was quite confident in his abilities. The light, however, was coming from a round stone at the edge of the path, right in front of the graves. Snape flicked his wandtip at it with a minimum of motion.

"Specialis Reveliato."

The stone's faint glow brightened, and script flickered in the air around it, analysing without activating. Snape's lips tightened as he read the results: the stone was enchanted to carry a simple message, designed to activate in his presence. It certainly wasn't harmful in itself, but it was alarming to find tracks of magical activity that was directed at him, personally, so close to home. He bent and pocketed the stone, then walked rapidly away, his shoulders hunched against the Wizarding World's gaze.

 

The stone had been left by Neville Longbottom, of all people. When Snape arrived home, he had placed the stone on the kitchen table, and tapped it with his wand. The voice that emerged was recognisably Longbottom's, though somewhat deeper than when Snape had last heard it.

"Hello, Professor Snape. I was wondering if you might contact me? I would like to discuss a rare plant that I've discovered in your area. I felt you might have some insight into the matter. Your owl can find me at Lovegood Cottage. It's in Ottery St. Catchpole."

Snape snorted. There was no point in keeping an owl when there was no-one with whom he regularly corresponded. Post owls were easy enough to find when required, even in a largely Muggle city. He just didn't understand why Neville Longbottom would have any desire whatsoever to contact him. He'd heard little of his former student during or after the war, though he assumed that Longbottom would have aided Potter, as most of that group of Gryffindors were at Potter's side in one way or another. He hadn't paid much attention to the long and changeable lists of dead and wounded as, at the time, his own future had been dubious. By the time his freedom was secured, Snape had rather preferred to stay away from the Wizarding World altogether.

His childhood home was in a Muggle area of a largely Muggle city, and although he had despised its ordinariness in his youth, he now greatly appreciated its isolation. His work required patience and solitude, and his experiments were long past the stage at which he required or appreciated the input of colleagues. The majority of the ingredients he required could be ordered and delivered, and the remainder necessitated only a few visits to London or Edinburgh each year. Snape did miss the Hogwarts greenhouses and their immense variety of useful plants, but he had eventually managed to cultivate a few absolute essentials in pots on his kitchen windowsill. Their lesser quality, however, had to be taken into account when preparing potions.

As isolated as he was, there was still demand for the more exotic of his potions. Nothing illegal, of course, though with potions the illegality was largely determined by their use, rather than their stated purpose. Almost everything Snape made would kill in large doses, or if taken at the wrong time or in the wrong way. A steady supply of Wolfsbane potion made its way out to those who could afford it, and the Ministry's demand for Veritaserum, while sporadic, provided a welcome source of income. The Ministry's expenditure had always been generous, having been convinced long ago that such potions were temperamental and difficult to make, requiring appropriate remuneration to cover the extensive costs. Snape's own Veritaserum rarely failed, though he needed to spend a great deal of time observing and balancing the brew to make sure that was the case. Despite his release from the incessant demands of teaching and the consequent devotion of time to potion brewing, the potions were as delicate and prone to spoilage as ever. Perhaps more so.

Snape's breath hissed from between his tightly pressed lips. He saw no harm in replying to Longbottom, and his curiosity demanded satisfaction. No-one else had sought him out for any reason other than the potions, so perhaps he could stand Longbottom's presence for a short period of time, if only to discover the boy's real motivation. Snape dashed off a reply, specifying time and location, then retrieved his coat and gloves for the walk to the post office, on the invisible top floor of the immense brick Muggle post office so that the owls could fly in and out without interruption from Muggles. On second thoughts, he took his umbrella. The owls had an uncanny way of targeting him as he trudged up the hidden stairs, which had been unhappily located directly under the entrance to the owlery.

***

The rain had stopped, but the leafless trees of the cemetery were still dripping and the lawns soaked. With the expected, but still disconcertingly loud, cracking sound, Neville Longbottom appeared by the path. He was, still, shorter than Snape, but considerably broader across the chest and shoulders; his face was as round as ever. He stuck out his hand in friendly greeting, but didn't seem in the least surprised when no response was made.

"Hello, Professor." He retracted his hand, but continued smiling.

"Mr Longbottom."

"Thank you for replying. I wasn't sure how to get in touch with you until Luna said I should try a message stone."

"I would be very interested to discover why you felt it appropriate to leave such an item at my parents' gravesite, or, indeed, why you decided to venture into this area of the country at all."

"I'll show you, Professor. Come with me." Longbottom gestured along the path and began to walk. Snape hesitated for a moment, then caught up and matched his stride.

"I didn't come here looking for them, if that's what you think. I was looking for a plant that I saw in a Muggle photograph. I didn't realise for ages that the photo was of a Muggle cemetery. I was really surprised it was, but when I learned that there was a witch buried there, it all made sense."

"There's no shortages of wizards and witches buried in Muggle cemeteries."

"Mostly in the old villages, and almost all dating from before the Statute of Secrecy. This cemetery's hardly a century old, and the photograph even newer."

"Why were you searching through Muggle photographs at all?"

Longbottom turned slightly, and smiled.

"You've decided I'm wasting my time, before you ask what I'm actually doing?"

"I don't find the assumption unreasonable," Snape sneered.

"No, I suppose you wouldn't." His slight emphasis on "you" seemed less bitter than vaguely nostalgic. "I'm finding plants. Endangered plants. Luna and I managed to enchant most of the garden into different climates and terrains, and the plants are doing well there."

"The Ministry's gardens, along with those of the various private growers, have always furnished sufficient herbs for my use." Snape waved a dismissive hand. "Professor Sprout's collection at Hogwarts was magnificent. Much of it survived, I believe."

"We had to replant most of the garden, but we saved pretty much everything that wasn't inside the greenhouse. Lucky we got onto it so quickly."

"The herbs would have been useful, I suppose, for the healing potions and unguents after the battles." Snape was a little nostalgic himself, for the relative riches of the Hogwarts gardens, if not for the company that he had kept there.

"Oh no, there was nothing that we could use so soon. It was all scorched, apart from a few hardier roots and tubers. We couldn't grow anything fast enough to help the injured and the cursed. They had to import most of that from France and Ireland."

"Then what do you mean about 'getting onto it quickly', Longbottom?"

Longbottom stopped walking, and looked at Snape with a puzzled frown on his round face.

"Haven't you felt it?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The magic. It's slipping away."

"I have felt no such-"

"Yes, I think you have." The corners of Longbottom's eyes creased, perhaps enjoying contradicting his former teacher, but the rest of his face was serious. "Maybe a Potions Master would be the last to see it – your work is all about balancing humours and compensating for deficiencies. I'm always around living things, and to me it's obvious." He reached out and absently stroked the rough, naked branch of a tree that was close to the crooked path, not noticing the muck that came off on his fingers. "Plants that used to need a little extra care are struggling just to put out shoots. Two months of reliable flowering is down to five weeks. The most delicate breeds are failing entirely. Even the mandrakes are going dormant."

"I didn't know this was everywhere. I haven't been in contact."

"You thought it was just you? Maybe you need a little more confidence in your own abilities, Professor." Longbottom shook his head, as if clearing it. "No, actually, I think everyone thought that at first. The Ministry's supposed to be forming some kind of committee to examine the matter, so I suppose not everyone knows. Or not everyone believes."

"Magic is not like water in a bucket," Snape said, quoting from his own First Year Defence Against the Dark Arts curriculum. "Using it is not like drinking the water. It's an infinite resource."

"Hermione says that's not right," Neville replied, with calm conviction.

"Miss Granger would know better than thousands of years of natural philosophy, would she? That's certainly on form for her."

"She's analysed it. She looked at old wands and analysed the magic in them, compared to the wand trees growing now. And ice from Norway. She looked at that, too. She copied Muggle equipment to find samples from tens of thousands of years ago."

"And what did all of this Muggle science tell her about magic?"

"It told her that it's damaged."

"I see." Snape poured years of scorn into his response, but Longbottom was undeterred in his argument, quite unlike the boy who had stuttered and stumbled through five years of Potions hoping above all not to be noticed.

"This didn't come out of nowhere, Professor. She worked with a team of Arithmancers. I think they were Unspeakables, but she couldn't say." Longbottom wiped his muddy hand on his dark robes, and scratched his head with his scrubbed but still dirt-tinged fingers, taking the time to gather his thoughts. "Their theory is, well, she explained it to me this way: magic is like a huge aquifer. We can't possibly use it all, but we can use so much in a short period of time that we drain the aquifer and have to wait for it to restore itself."

Snape frowned at the thought of the over-eager, homework-obsessed Granger as an adult, holding her own with Unspeakables, expounding her Muggle theories in the halls of the Ministry. He wondered, idly, if she still expected to be graded on her work.

"She thinks the battle damaged the substance of magic itself?" Snape was listening, despite himself. Longbottom, surprisingly, was making sense. Not only that, but he wasn't witlessly parrotting Granger's ideas, for once: he thoroughly and passionately understood the concept that he was explaining.

"Not permanently. She said their calculations show the last battle consumed so much magic that the most delicate magical beings are starving to death. Stronger beings, like wizards or goblins, can still grab enough to keep going."

"The battle couldn't have possibly used up so much magic. There's been magical battles before, and there's no record of magic loss."

"Hermione said it's much easier to find in retrospect." Longbottom smiled. "She explains it much better than Professor Binns ever did."

"Most people would call that hindsight, not research."

"The last major battle, she thinks, started the Little Ice Age, around the time Nicolas Flamel was born. It was Chinese wizards, that time, fighting Mongolian wizards allied with Genghis Khan."

"You may not have been paying sufficient attention in Professor Binns' classes, but there have been battles more recently than the fourteenth century." Despite his interest, Snape couldn't stop himself needling Longbottom, just to see if there would be a change in that unfamiliarly calm demeanour.

"Grindelwald? Hermione thinks that might link to the drop in pure-blood births. The most fragile, dependent things fail first, you see. Luna and I – I don't think we'll have children of our own."

"A great loss to the Wizarding World, I'm sure."

"Thanks for your sympathy." One corner of Longbottom's mouth quirked up, as if Snape's venom amused him. "Hermione doesn't think the Wizarding World itself will collapse, but the balance will keep tilting towards the Muggleborns as the last pure-bloods die out. So much for blood purity. The Death Eaters brought themselves down."

Longbottom turned abruptly, almost angrily, and walked the short remaining distance to the Snape gravestones. He reached out a hand to brush a leaf from the top of Tobias Snape's gravestone, but Snape stepped in front of him and knocked the leaf away first.

"If you're so convinced that Hermione Granger is correct," Snape said, determined not to let go of the argument, "Why are you bothering with these plants? Surely your efforts could be better spent in conserving magical energies."

"It's probably not a very Gryffindor notion, Professor, but worth is not always determined by strength." Longbottom's voice was level. He did not seem in the least disconcerted by anything other than his own mention of the Death Eaters, and Snape was finding this new equanimity rather disturbing.

"A utilitarian view, then? You will protect the plants that have the best uses, the ones that are vital for potions and spells. I think – it may be true, what you suppose, about the level of magic in the world. Everything is unbalanced. Ingredients don't combine, or, if they do, they cannot exceed the sum of the parts."

"You know that potions has never been my strong point." Longbottom shook his head. "I can't just save the useful plants. I protect plants because they are in need of protection. Their existence is valuable to me."

Snape frowned, and traced his long fingers over the writing on his mother's gravestone, then realised what he was doing and snatched his hand away. Longbottom knelt down in the muddy grass beside the grave and touched the earth beside the marker.

"I saw a photograph of this grave, and there was a plant, just here. It had star-shaped, six-petalled flowers, and long leaves, like a tulip or an iris. And the flowers were white."

"Why is it so special that you would bother coming here?"

"Pliny the Elder wrote about it, from Homer's description in the Odyssey. 'The most celebrated of all plants is that, which, according to Homer, is known as moly among the gods.' It's an ancient variety of allium moly. They're all yellow, now."

"My mother grew it in a pot in the kitchen. It was the only thing she grew. I planted it here for her, but it must be dead now. The ones in the kitchen died."

"Oh no, it grows from a bulb. It'll be underground, not dead, I hope. May I look?"

Snape frowned, but waved a hand in assent. Longbottom drew his wand and held it over the earth beside the grave.

"Accio Levissima Moly," he said firmly, and, after a moment, three lumpy, dirty bulbs slowly emerged from the earth and settled gently into his hand. "Look. The moly was still here. Just biding its time."

Snape reached out slowly and took one of the muddy bulbs from Longbottom's hand. Where the bulb showed through the mud, it was an deep and organic black, like ink.

"The plant made the kitchen smell faintly of garlic," Snape muttered, "But she never told me they were a magical plant. Or where they came from."

"She's not the only one who took her secrets with her," Longbottom replied, and suddenly looked less like an overgrown schoolboy than a man who had lived longer than he expected, older and very tired. "It's a protective herb. It protects against magic. If I'd tried to remove it without your permission, it wouldn't have come up intact."

Snape looked at the bulb in his hand and the thick mud that now caked his palm. It was disorienting to realise that he could understand why his mother would protect herself against the magical world, against stares and jeers and the knowledge of failure; why she would prefer to retreat into silence than fight for what was hers by right. His hand closed over the bulb for a moment, then he shoved it into Longbottom's hand.

"Take care of it."

"I will, Professor. Come and see it when it's grown. Maybe there'll be enough to bring one back, for your mother. You can tell us more about her, maybe. Share the knowledge."

Snape's hand rested on his mother's grave, and this time he did not pull away. Even after Longbottom Apparated away, he stood there for a long time in what felt like an oddly companionable silence, until drizzle began to fall. When he Apparated, the noise lasted only a moment, then the rain settled in and wrapped the cold graveyard in peace and silence.

 

***  
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History (eds. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A.)  
BOOK XXV. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF WILD PLANTS

According to Homer, the most celebrated of all plants is that, which, according to him, is known as moly among the gods. The discovery of it he attributes to Mercury, who was also the first to point out its uses as neutralizing the most potent spells of sorcery. At the present day, it is said, it grows in the vicinity of Lake Pheneus, and in Cyllene, a district of Arcadia. It answers the description given of it by Homer, having a round black root, about as large as an onion, and a leaf like that of the squill: there is no difficulty experienced in taking it up. The Greek writers have delineated it as having a yellow flower, while Homer, on the other hand, has spoken of it as white. I once met with a physician, a person extremely well acquainted with plants, who assured me that it is found growing in Italy as well, and that he would send me in a few days a specimen which had been dug up in Campania, with the greatest difficulty, from a rocky soil. The root of it was thirty Feet in length, and even then it was not entire, having been broken in the getting up.


End file.
